Folk Art in the South: Selections from the Permanent CollectionJUNE 11–SEPTEMBER 11, 2016Drawn from the Morris Museum’s permanent collection, this presentation included work by some of the region’s best-known folk artists. Though the work of some of these artists may have been familiar, much of it had not been exhibited before. Folk artists’ major themes were expressed in many different ways. They employed readily accessible materials—crayons, markers, house paint—as well as found objects, to produce their paintings, drawings, and sculpture, putting mundane materials to fresh and ingenious uses. This installation underscored the Morris Museum’s status as one of the leading collectors of folk art in the region.

The World of Rolland GoldenAUGUST 6–OCTOBER 30, 2016Still active at eighty-four, Rolland Golden is one of the most renowned artists to have emerged in the South during the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to the styles of realism and “abstract realism,” he is known for a style he developed, which he calls “’borderline surrealism,’ realistic imagery in a not impossible, but highly unlikely situation.” Golden was born in New Orleans, but his father’s job at AT&T had the family moving with frequency—first to Grenada, Mississippi, and later Jackson, Mississippi, eventually to Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, before returning to New Orleans more or less for good. His work has been the subject of more than one hundred museum exhibitions, including, most recently, Rolland Golden: An Alternate Vision at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and River and Reverie: Paintings of the Mississippi, which was organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art and shown in five other museums in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Paintings by Victoria LoweAPRIL 23–JULY 24, 2016Victoria Lowe was born in 1947 in Birmingham, Alabama. She was educated at the University of Alabama where she earned a BS in education in 1969. Lowe focused on painting in graduate school at the University of Alabama, where she received an MA in Visual Arts in 1971. Over the past four decades, her paintings and drawings have focused primarily on atmospheric surfaces and gradations of color. Consistent throughout this body of work is her concern with energy in its many forms and the viewer’s deep emotional response to color. She has noted that the paintings have their origin in her childhood experiences of stargazing through a telescope, and in her feeling of sublime connectedness to things beyond the physical environment and conscious comprehension. Her paintings are free of narrative or subject matter and offer viewers a way to experience the depth of their own imagination.

Collages and Assemblages by AldwythMAY 18–JULY 27, 2016Aldwyth constructs intensely detailed and complex mural-sized collages that incorporate hundreds of small shapes cut from printed materials. When seen from a distance, the pieces form a grid-like design. As the viewer moves in, she discovers vignettes and individual stories created by juxtaposed images, text, and color.

Scenic Impressions: Southern Interpretations from the Johnson CollectionJANUARY 16–APRIL 10, 2016This exhibition presented dozens of works that were intended at the time of their creation to offer relief from the hurly-burly of the urban setting. The artists represented—Wayman Adams, Colin Campbell Cooper, Elliott Daingerfield, Gaines Ruger Donoho, James Herring, Alfred Hutty, John Ross Key, Blondelle Malone, Paul Plaschke, Hattie Saussy, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Anthony Thieme, Helen Turner, and Ellsworth Woodward, among others—were not all native Southerners; however, all worked in the South at some point. In its presentation of some forty paintings created between 1880 and 1940—including landscapes and genre scenes—Scenic Impressions traced an international aesthetic’s journey to and germination in the American South.

The Wild Treasury of Nature: A Portrait of Little St. Simons IslandFEBRUARY 20–MAY 22, 2016Artist Philip Juras's depictions of Little St. Simons Island made up the body of work that was exhibited here for the first time. While so much of the Southeastern seaboard has been transformed by rampant development, it seems miraculous that such an experience can still be had. Of all the barrier islands, Little St. Simons Island, off the coast of Georgia, is one of the most pristine. In April 2011 Juras was invited to paint the natural environments of Little St. Simons, a subject that he’s been exploring since. The works in this exhibit (and the book that accompanied it) captured a wide variety of the island’s natural landscapes. These beautiful paintings created a portrait of the dynamic natural environments of the island. Philip Juras was the Morris Museum of Art's 2016 featured gala artist.

Pottery from the Smith Callaway Banks Southern Folk Art Collection at Georgia Southern UniversityMARCH 12–JUNE 5, 2016Callaway Banks was an avid collector of folk art, purchasing his first piece, a face jug, in the 1980s. Until his death in 2010, Banks continued to travel the South, purchasing work and making friends with hundreds of artists. In 2007 he donated a large part of his collection, more than one thousand objects, including approximately 250 pieces of pottery, to Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, his hometown. This exhibition included vessels and sculptures by a variety of artists—from early members of the well-known Meaders family of Northeast Georgia to contemporary potters such as Stacy Lambert and Crystal King of North Carolina. Each put his or her own creative spin on the medium. Some pieces inspired laughter or surprise, while others were delightful portraits of people and animals.

2015

Winter Dreams: Works of Art from the Permanent CollectionNOVEMBER 21, 2015–JANUARY 31, 2016The present exhibition features more than forty little seen works of art—paintings, drawings, photographs, and three-dimensional objects by more than a dozen twentieth-century Southern artists. Eldridge Bagley and Jack Stoddart are represented by works featured in previous Morris Museum exhibitions, while other artists’ works have never been shown here before. There are beautiful winter scenes such as the impressionistic work by Julia Alice Collins, Landscape—Snow in Winter. Imagination certainly informs the work of all the folk artists here. Purus Country Store, Calhoun, Georgia, by Alpha J. Frise, exemplifies that. Jack Stoddart’s photograph Winter Barn, shot near his home on the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee, captures winter—a season most Southerners would prefer to experience through their living room windows—at its most sublime in that part of the South.

Creatures Great and Small, Real and Imagined: The Art of Mae and Willie TarverDECEMBER 5, 2015–FEBRUARY 28, 2016Some of these nearly two dozen fantastical sculptures were inspired by nature, while others show the uninhibited imagination of nationally known folk artists Mae and Willie Tarver. The Tarvers saw much of the world before returning to Wadley, Georgia, after many years of living in New York. In Wadley, Willie worked at Thermo King Corporation for twenty-five years as a refrigerator repairman and foreman, and Mae had a successful business of her own as a hairdresser. They were married for fifty-five years before his death in 2010.

Real Lives: Observations and Reflections by Dale KenningtonOCTOBER 17, 2015–JANUARY 3, 2016Organized by the Friends of the Mennello Museum of American Art, the exhibition featured nearly thirty paintings by acclaimed realist Dale Kennington. Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1935, she earned a BA in art history from the University of Alabama in 1956 before marrying and moving to Dothan, Alabama. She turned to painting in her early forties because she wanted portraits of her children; years later, she gave up portraiture for the kind of work for which she has become famous. The recipient of many accolades and honors over the years, she was recognized by the Alabama State Council on the Arts with a Governor’s Arts Award in 2011.

Decoys from the Collection of Dr. Lloyd NewberrySEPTEMBER 12–DECEMBER 1, 2015Dr. Lloyd Newberry, an avid big-game hunter, author, and retired educator, began collecting decoys in the late 1960s. Fascinated by the wooden birds, he took several trips northward along the East Coast from his Georgia home, seeking out fellow decoy collectors, antique shops, and carvers, purchasing a variety of hand-carved, painted birds and listening to the stories of craftsmen and hunters. Today early American decoys are highly collectible and widely recognized as a true form of early American folk art.

Contemporary American Studio Glass from the Collection of Eugene FleischerJUNE 13–SEPTEMBER 6, 2015This collection, still a work in progress, was begun some years ago by Augustan Eugene Fleischer, an avid collector of many kinds of things since he was a boy. Among the glass artists represented in the exhibition are Rick Beck, Audrey Handler, Jon Kuhn, Charles Lotton, Mark Peiser, Stephen Rolfe Powell, and Lisabeth Sterling. This exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by the Morris Museum of Art.

The New American Landscape: Paintings by Robert StarkAUGUST 15–NOVEMBER 8, 2015Artist Robert Stark has lived and painted in Union Dale, Pennsylvania, for forty years. He also maintains a studio on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where he and his wife spend their winters. His paintings have traveled to more than 140 world capitals under the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program. He is represented in museum, corporate, and private collections all over the United States

Paintings by William WillisMAY 9–AUGUST 2, 2015Bill Willis is well known for abstract paintings and works on paper that are inspired by the natural world and influenced by Eastern philosophy and religion. His work—recognized with awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and many others— has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Phillips Collection and the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and it has been included in group exhibitions at numerous museums and galleries. His work is included in the permanent collections of important public, private, and corporate collections.

The African American Voice: Works from the State Art Collection of South CarolinaAUGUST 1–OCTOBER 4, 2015This exhibition included forty works of art in several media—paintings, drawings, and sculpture—from the State Art Collection of South Carolina. These artworks were created in recent times by twenty-five celebrated African American artists, all of whom have close ties to the state. The exhibition included work by famed outsider artists Sam Doyle, Leroy Marshall, Richard Burnside, and Dan Robert Miller, as well as work by academically trained artists Leo Twiggs, Arthur Rose, Tarleton Blackwell, Mac Arthur Goodwin, Jesse Guinyard, Joseph Gandy, Terry K. Hunter, Larry Jordan, Larry Lebby, Robert Spencer, and Winston Wingo.

For the Birds: Folk Art BirdhousesMARCH 14–JUNE 7, 2015This exhibition was a representative sample of a large collection of birdhouses, which were acquired by the Morris over the past several years—gifts from one of the museum’s most generous supporters, collector Julia J. Norrell. To Norrell, birdhouses reflected the region’s vernacular architecture wrought small. Over the years, her childhood fascination evolved into a love for the larger world of folk art. For those who love houses but can only afford one at a time, collecting birdhouses offers the pleasures of self-indulgence and the opportunity to acquire house after house—whether cottage, log cabin, schoolhouse, or Greek revival mansion—without the burden of having to secure a mortgage.

Steffen Thomas RediscoveredAPRIL 25–JULY 19, 2015Prolific and multifaceted, artist Steffen Thomas (1906–1990) was born in Fürth, Germany, but lived most of his adult life in Georgia. Though he’s particularly noted for monumental public art, he was the master of many media, including painting (oils, watercolor, and encaustic), sculpture, mosaic, and printmaking. Much of his work exhibits the influence of expressionism, which originated in Germany early in the twentieth century. This exhibition was originally presented in slightly different form at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in January 2014.

In Celebration of Golf: Landscapes by Linda HartoughFEBRUARY 21–APRIL 6, 2015Perhaps golf’s leading artist, Linda Hartough graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1970. She made a living as a professional artist in Chicago until 1980, when she moved to South Carolina. She painted landscapes, portraits, and horses until 1984, when Augusta National Golf Club commissioned her to paint the famed thirteenth hole, which began her career as a golf landscape artist. Her work has since gained international fame. The only artist ever commissioned by the United States Golf Association and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews to do the annual, official paintings and prints for the U.S. Open and British Open Championships, she has painted golf courses from Scotland to China. Her paintings are in the collections of the Augusta National, Pine Valley, and Laurel Valley golf clubs and in many private collections, including those of Jack Nicklaus and Robert Trent Jones.

American Dreams: Paintings by John MellencampJANUARY 11–APRIL 12, 2015According to Mellencamp, “German painting remains the basic foundation for what I do, same as folk music is the foundation of my songs. Discovering Beckmann to me was like discovering Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan.” Mellencamp’s paintings have been the subject of a number of exhibitions—Nothing Like I Planned at the Tennessee State Museum in 2012, and The Paintings of John Mellencamp at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, in 2013, and currently at the Museum of Art—DeLand, Florida. American Dreams: Paintings by John Mellencamp—fifty oil and mixed-media paintings, included several that have never been seen by the public—was at the Morris Museum from January 11 through April 12, 2015.

Knowledge in Depth: Sculpture by Brian DettmerDECEMBER 11, 2014–MARCH 1, 2015Widely known for his alteration of preexisting media such as old books, maps, record albums, and cassette tapes, contemporary artist Brian Dettmer is a native of Naperville, Illinois. He earned a BA in fine arts from Columbia College Chicago, where his principal focus was painting. Following graduation, he worked as an artist and in positions related to graphics and signage design. In recent years, a large body of his work has been created by altering books—old dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, science and engineering books, art books, medical guides, atlases, and others. He cuts into the books, exposing select images and text to create intricate three-dimensional works that reveal new or alternative interpretations of the books. From 2006 until a recent move to New York City, he lived and worked in Atlanta. His work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries around the world.

An Artist's Story: Civil War Drawings by Edwin ForbesNOVEMBER 8, 2014–FEBRUARY 15, 2015This exhibition, opened in conjunction with the fourth Augusta and the Civil War symposium, featured the work of a leading nineteenth-century-American landscape painter and etcher, Edwin Forbes, who first came to public attention as a very young artist for his dramatic and detailed Civil War sketches. He earned renown for the vividness and blunt truthfulness of his imagery.

2014

Sculpture by Nathan Bindler(September 16–December 7, 2014)Drawn from the collections of the artist’s son and daughter, local collections, and the Morris’s permanent collection, this exhibition featured more than fifteen carved wood sculptures by Nathan Bindler, for many years a mainstay of Augusta’s cultural community. An accomplished musician and visual artist, he was the first chair violist in the Augusta Symphony for many years and taught art at Augusta College from the time of his arrival in Augusta in 1968 until his retirement in 1980. After his retirement, he remained on campus, working in a studio as the college’s artist-in-residence, a bracing presence who stayed actively engaged with students and the life of the college.

From New York to Nebo: The Artistic Journey of Eugene Thomason(October 11–December 28, 2014)This exhibition was drawn largely from the Johnson Collection of Spartanburg, South Carolina, which holds the largest single body of Thomason’s paintings. It was supplemented by major works on loan from the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; the Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama; and the Morris Museum of Art.

Oh! Augusta! Photographs by William Greiner(August 23–November 2, 2014)This exhibition was drawn entirely from the Morris Museum’s permanent collection and represented a group of photographs that were shot over a period of just a few days in January 2012 and was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog. In addition to the Morris, William Greiner is represented in the permanent collections of more than sixty museums around the country, including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Art from the Collection of Jonathan Green and Richard Weedman(June 14–September 28, 2014)Over the past thirty-five years, acclaimed artist Jonathan Green and his partner and studio director, Richard Weedman, have amassed an astonishing collection of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by African American, Caribbean, Latin American, and American artists that reflects the breadth of their interests, the cultural diversity that has contributed so vitally to the development of American art, and the themes of work, love, belonging, and spirituality. More than forty works of art were selected from their collection of more than thirteen hundred objects for this exhibition at the Morris Museum of Art.

This Happy Land: Paintings by William Entrekin(May 31–August 17, 2014)One of Georgia’s leading realist painter—he often invites comparison to Andrew Wyeth—William Entrekin, a native of Rome, Georgia, and now a resident of Acworth, was represented here by more than thirty works in watercolor, oil, and egg tempera—landscapes, figure paintings, and still lifes. His work is widely collected by individuals, corporations, and museums. He leaves the viewer with the sense that these are subjects that one already knows. He paints the real world as he knows it—the people and places that are close to his heart.

Generations: Turned Bowls by Ed, Philip, and Matt Moulthrop(March 22–June 22, 2014)Drawn from local collections, this exhibition represented the work of three generations of the acclaimed Moulthrop family of woodturners. Ed Moulthrop (May 22, 1916–September 24, 2003), credited as the “father of modern woodturning,” was a noted architect and professor before becoming a woodturning artist and transforming it into a widely respected art form. His son, Philip Moulthrop (born November 12, 1947, in Atlanta, Georgia), was an attorney who abandoned the legal profession to work as a full-time woodturner. Philip’s son, Matt Moulthrop (born November 8, 1977, in Atlanta), followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. He turned his first bowl at the age of 7.

Drawings and Watercolors by James Calvert Smith(April 1–June 15, 2014)James Calvert Smith’s commissions included murals in the American Museum of Natural History and the Ford Foundation in New York, and the Library of Congress. In addition to his illustrations and cartoons, Smith also painted landscapes. The graceful union of nature and village in his scenes became known as the “Smith Style.” He spent most of his professional life in Connecticut and Virginia and returned to Florida in 1946, where he lived and worked until his death in 1962.

Paintings by Bo Bartlett and Betsy Eby(March 7–June 1, 2014)Betsy Eby and Bo Bartlett, husband and wife, live during the winter in Columbus, Georgia, where he is active with the Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University. They spend their summers on an island off the coast of Maine. Their work can be found in public and private collections throughout the United States, including that of the Morris Museum of Art. Bartlett and Eby were the 2014 featured artists at the Morris Museum of Art Gala.

Soldier Artist: Conrad Wise Chapman(March 15–May 25, 2014)An ardent Southerner, Conrad Wise Chapman (1842–1910), unable to reconcile himself to the Confederacy’s loss, traveled to Mexico for a time after the Civil War. Eventually, he moved his family to Richmond, Virginia, and in 1898 sold the paintings in this exhibition to what has become the Museum of the Confederacy. They remain an important part of that museum’s collections to this day.

Blues Haiku and New Monotypes by Phil Garrett(January 21–March 30, 2014)Phil Garrett studied at the University of South Carolina and the Honolulu Academy of Arts before earning a BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1974. He lived and worked in the Bay Area until 1979, when he returned to South Carolina, where he has lived since. He founded King Snake Press in 1998. Blues Haiku represents something of a departure for him. The seven linocuts in the series refer to and honor Piedmont blues artists and their songs.

King Snake Press: A Fifteenth Anniversary Overview(January 11–March 9, 2014)The Morris Museum of Art celebrated the fifteen-year history of King Snake Press with a special exhibition that featured nearly three dozen unique prints by many of the important artists who have worked with the press and its founder, Phil Garrett.

Released from Stone: Animal Sculpture by Jeff Birchill(December 5, 2013–March 2, 2014)Birchill set up a workspace in his backyard and started carving figures, chiefly animals, out of stone. All of his work is created by hand—that is, he carves only with a hammer and various chisels. He believes that most work done with power tools looks as if the tools controlled the artist and not the other way around. To an unusual degree, the stone itself determines what he as an artist does with it. This was his first museum exhibition.

The Worlds of Hunt Slonem(December 7, 2013–February 23, 2014)A prolific painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Slonem has become best known for his neoexpressionist paintings of tropical birds, which are often based on or inspired by a personal aviary he has maintained over the years. Now one of America’s most renowned artists, his work is included in more than fifty major museum collections, including those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Morris Museum of Art, to cite just a few. His work has been exhibited internationally, and in the United States alone it has been the subject of one-person exhibitions in more than thirty museums.

Images of Hearth and Home by Eldridge Bagley (November 12, 2013–January 19, 2014) Contemporary folk artist Eldridge Bagley was born in 1945 and raised on a farm outside Kenbridge, Virginia, where he continues to live with his wife, Beth, and their son, Wade. Inspired by his home region of Southside Virginia, he began painting in 1973. He is wholly self-taught and paints, as he says, “straight from the heart.” While many of his paintings recall the rural Virginia of his youth, they are not strictly documentary. He is inspired by his surroundings, employing memory, personal experience, and imagination in equal parts to chronicle a lifestyle that once sustained many, but today is nearly lost to the encroachment of exurbia and the steady advance of the big-box store. His work entered the Morris Museum through the acquisition of the Norrell Collection in 2006. He was represented in this exhibition by dozens of paintings, all of them depicting his beloved Southside.

2013

Starters: Selections from the Wells Fargo Collection(September 14–November 24, 2013)Through much of the fall, the Morris is displayed a large sampling from the Wells Fargo Collection, one of the most renowned corporate collections in the United States. The exhibition included representative examples from the company's main areas of collecting interest—nineteenth-century American paintings, contemporary prints, photography, and art nouveau posters—and features fifty works of art in a variety of media. These works offered a broad overview of artistic development from the 1830s through the twentieth century. The exhibition highlighted a number of major artistic contributors, including Andy Warhol, Helen Frankenthaler, Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Roy DeCarava, George Caleb Bingham, and Alphonse Mucha, among many others.

Dark Corners: The Appalachian Murder Ballads: Paintings by Julyan Davis(October 12–December 15, 2013)Dark Corners interpreted traditional American, English, and Celtic ballads through images of the contemporary South. Davis noted that the folk songs that are native to the South provided him with a familiar narrative and a human history that connects to his own background. In his view, the stories may be old, but, "one only has to pick up a newspaper to see that they remain fully contemporary." Davis described the songs as close to his heart and identifies the folk music of the American South as something that has provided him with a direct connection to the Southern landscape for more than half of his life.

Richard Jolley and Tommie Rush: The Art of Glass(August 9–November 10, 2013) This exhibition featured sculpture by two of the leading contemporary glass artists in the country, husband and wife Richard Jolley and Tommie Rush. Jolley studied under Michael Taylor, first at Tusculum College and later at George Peabody College, where he earned his BFA degree in 1974. He pursued further study at the Penland School of Crafts. Tommie Rush earned her BFA degree at the University of Tennessee and has also studied at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. Their work is in major public, private, and corporate collections, and in 2011, the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama, organized a joint retrospective exhibition of their work. They live in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Formal Candids: Photographs by Greg Kinney(September 3–November 10, 2013) Atlanta native Greg Kinney established himself as one of Nashville, Tennessee's leading commercial photographers. During the time he maintained his own studio, he produced the photographs that appeared in this exhibition, most of them shot in smaller communities in Middle Tennessee.

The Gladness of Nature: Paintings by Honor Marks(July 27–October 6, 2013) Honor Marks grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and remembers slogging through the marshes of the lowcountry as a child searching for rare wildflowers with her family. Today, she continues the journey through her artwork. Drawing her inspiration from writers Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, and Madeleine L'Engle and a host of botanical and natural history painters, Honor "transforms meticulous field study into bold, yet sensitive paintings of some of our most beautiful and rare botanical specimens," according to Burton Moore of the Audubon Gallery in Charleston.

Tradition/Innovation: American Masterpieces of Southern Craft and Traditional Art(June 8–September 1, 2013) The artists represented in Tradition/Innovation resided in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The beautifully crafted objects displayed symbolized, among other things, family heritage, cultural identity, and artistic inheritance. They are a vital part of the living artistic heritage of the contemporary South. Tradition/Innovation is a project of South Arts and was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Its appearance at the Morris Museum of Art concluded a lengthy region-wide tour.

North Carolina Pottery from the Collection of Dr. Nancy Farmer and Dr. A. Everette James(April 30–August 4, 2013) Recently, Dr. Nancy Farmer and Dr. A. Everette James, husband and wife and collectors of all things Southern—quilts, paintings, furniture, and pottery—donated a collection of North Carolina pottery to the Morris. These pieces were the first significant examples of one of the South's richest decorative arts traditions to become part of the Morris's holdings. The collection represented Seagrove, a very small town (population 250) in Randolph County, North Carolina. Its influence is disproportionate to its size. Notable for its many potteries, it is sometimes referred to as the "pottery capital of the world."

"We'll Understand it Better, By and By": Paintings William H. Clarke(May 11–July 13, 2013) Several years ago, the Morris Museum of Art added to its holdings dozens of paintings by one of Virginia's most admired self-taught artists, William H. Clarke, when it acquired the Southern collection of Julia J. Norrell. This was Clarke's first one-person exhibition at the Morris Museum of Art.

Mortal Coil: Photographs by Jennifer Onofrios Fornes(April 16–June 23, 2013) An art professor at Georgia Regents University, Jennifer Onofrio Fornes earned a BFA degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MFA degree from the University of California, Davis. She taught drawing, sculpture, installation, and photography at the University of Minnesota, Morris, prior to her present appointment.

Romantic Spirits: Nineteenth Century Paintings of the South from the Johnson Collection(March 2–May 26, 2013) This exhibition, the handsome publication that accompanies it, and the Johnson Collection as a whole enriches our perspective by increasing our understanding of the lives and art of the extraordinary painters whose work, though rooted in a specific time and place, is an integral part of American culture.

First Lady Ellen Axson Wilson and Her Circle(March 9–May 5, 2013) This exhibition brought together eighteen of Ellen Axson Wilson's paintings with work by such colleagues, friends, and teachers as George de Forest Brush, Chauncey Ryder, Childe Hassam, Walter Griffin, and Bessie Potter Vonnoh on loan to the Morris from some of the leading museums in the South.

Images of Community: Highlights from the Julia J. Norrell Collection(January 29–April 14, 2013) The pieces included in this special exhibition were all selected from the Norrell Collection, an important part of the Morris Museum's permanent collection. Community—as it is reflected in a sense of shared interests, beliefs, pursuits, needs, locality, or region—is a theme that pervades the Norrell Collection. As former President Bill Clinton noted in his foreword to Common Ground: Discovering Community in 150 Years of Art, "The art that Judy collects is a reflection both of what she believes and of her perception of the world. She knows that there is always beauty in truth—even if that truth momentarily seems harsh. She understands that our life experiences—churchgoing, work, a loved one's funeral, our rituals—draw us closer together rather than move us further apart."

Reflections on Water in American Painting(November 10, 2012–February 10, 2013) In this exhibition, fifty paintings from the Arthur J. Phelan Collection traced more than a century of America's maritime and seaside history, and transported viewers from the Eastern to the Western Shores of the United States. The exhibition ranged in date from 1828 to 1945, and included masterful renderings of sailboats, warships, waterside towns, waterscapes, and harbor scenes, as well as playful portrayals of beach life encapsulating all facets of life on and via the water. These works of art documented changing trends in transportation and recorded economic shifts as inland maritime commerce slowly diminished in the wake of railroad expansion. The exhibition also illustrated varying artistic trends that shaped American art. Represented were grand academic-style portraits of graceful naval ships and waterscapes from the sea to the American heartland, light-flooded impressionist visions of quaint seaside towns, and modernist renderings of industrialization and everyday life.

Shadows of History: Photographs of the Civil War from the Collection of Julia J. Norrell Collection(December 8, 2012–March 3, 2013) Exploring how photography documented the Civil War, this exhibition included more than thirty works by some of the most prominent photographers of the day—George Barnard, Mathew Brady, and Isaac H. Bonsall, among others. From tinytype and ambrotype portraits to rare images of African American regiments, this show highlights themes of human devastation and the impact of war on the landscape and its people. Shadows of History was organized by Philip Brookman and Kaitlin Booher at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and was drawn from the collection of Washington, D.C., collector Julia J. Norrell. In addition, a catalogue, Shadows of History, was produced by the Morris Museum of Art.

Images of South Carolina: Block Prints by Edna Reed Whaley
(December 4, 2012–January 27, 2013) This exhibition featured the work of Edna Reed Whaley. Born in New Orleans in 1884, studied art at Sophie Newcomb College. As a young bride, she moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where she became one of South Carolina's leading artists and arts advocates. In addition to her own artistic pursuits, she taught classes and served as the art critic for the Record newspaper. She had work in regional exhibitions, most notably those sponsored by the Southern States Art League. She was a driving force in the cultural community of Columbia in the early part of the twentieth century, and, along with her husband, Judge Marcellus Seabrook Whaley, she was a founding member of the Columbia Art Association in 1916. Later, she was one of four founders of the Columbia Art Museum. She is represented in the Morris Museum of Art's permanent collection by twenty-three woodblock prints, a gift of the Coggins Art Trust in 1993.

2012

Portraits of Southern Artists by Jerry Siegel(September 22–December 2, 2012)
A selection of Jerry Siegel's black-and-white portraits of thirty-three iconic Southern artists—all of whom are represented by works in the Morris Museum collection—were displayed in the Morris Museum's Coggins Gallery. Siegel studied at the University of South Alabama and the Art Institute of Atlanta. While successfully maintaining a commercial photography studio in Atlanta since the 1980s, he found his passion in traveling the Southeast to capture the true essence of painters, sculptors, photographers, and printmakers. Winner of the first Artadia Award in Atlanta in 2009, Siegel has been honored by solo exhibitions of his work at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, Louisiana); the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (Atlanta); the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, Alabama); and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art (Auburn, Alabama), among others. His work is in private and corporate collections throughout the Southeast.

The Morris at Twenty(July 7–September 16, 2012)
This exhibition emphasized acquisitions made over the past ten years—an unusually rich period marked especially by the addition of the Julia J. Norrell Collection, with particular strength in folk art and photography. The bequest of the Larry Connatser Art Trust added the work of an important contemporary Georgia artist, and purchases made through the Passailaigue Art Acquisitions Fund further enriched the permanent collection. Finally, the support of the museum affiliate groups the Morris Collectors and the Friends of African American Art also made important acquisitions possible. The recent purchase of a painting by Brian Rutenberg, displayed for the first time, was made possible by the Morris Collectors.

The Art of Alfred Hutty: Woodstock to Charleston(August 4–October 28, 2012)
This exhibition was organized by the Gibbes Museum of Art, the largest public repository of Hutty's work. It was accompanied by a major publication, published by the University of South Carolina Press, which is available in the museum store. One of the principal artists of the Charleston Renaissance, Alfred Hutty played important roles in two very different art colonies—Woodstock, New York, and Charleston, South Carolina. His evocative landscapes and sympathetic studies of the human condition represent the best aspects of the artistic traditions of each place during the early twentieth century.

Office: Sculpture by Bob Trotman(April 10–September 30, 2012)
As a contemporary artist, Bob Trotman is fascinated by what he describes as the "noir narrative of life at the office." His wooden people, often surprisingly posed, evoke both humor and anxiety and, taken together, offer an absurdist vision of an imaginary corporate purgatory.

Window on the West: Views from the American Frontier(March 24–July 21, 2012)
Window on the West featured highlights from the collection of Arthur J. Phelan and gave an intriguing glimpse of the American West through sixty objects, including paintings large and small, as well as gem-like works on paper in a variety of styles. Artists included Frederic Remington, Samuel Colman, Alfred Jacob Miller, Karl Bodmer, and John Frederick Kensett, and emphasized the views of lesser-known artists recording what they observed in the newly settled West. The exhibition was circulated by Exhibits Development Group of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Golden Afternoon: English Watercolors from the Elsley Collection(April 21–July 1, 2012)
This exhibition featured John Elsley's collection of nineteenth-century paintings of Victorian-era English gardens. Assembled over the past forty years, Golden Afternoon captured images of some of the most beautiful garden designs created at the turn of the last century. The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by the Morris Museum of Art.

Fore!: Images in Golf(February 4–April 15, 2012)Fore!: Images in Golf celebrated both the game and the special place that it holds in Augusta. The exhibition was organized by the Morris Museum with the assistance of Harmon-Meek Gallery in Naples, Florida. The exhibition included more than thirty-five works of art—photographs, paintings, and drawings by such well-known artists as LeRoy Neiman, Will Barnet, Timothy J. Clark, Ray Ellis, Lucy McTier, Dan Rizzie, Linda Hartough, Frank Christian, and Philip Morsberger, among many others.

Working South: Paintings and Sketches by Mary Whyte(December 3, 2011–March 11, 2012)Working South highlighted the work of artist Mary Whyte, and was the focus of the Morris Museum of Art's 2012 Gala.From the textile mill worker and tobacco farmer to the sponge diver and elevator operator, Mary Whyte has sought out some of the last remnants of rural and industrial workforces declining or altogether lost through changes in our economy, environment, technology, and fashion. She is a teacher and author whose figurative paintings have earned national recognition. A resident of Johns Island, South Carolina, she has been inspired in much of her work by the Gullah descendants of slaves, who number among her most prominent subjects.

Local Color: Photography in the South(November 12, 2011–January 29, 2012)
Selected from the Morris Museum of Art's permanent collection, Local Color: Photography in the South included more than thirty-five photographs dating from the mid-sixties to the present by some of the South's most important photographers, including Dave Anderson, John Baeder, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Janos Enyedi, William Greiner, Birney Imes, Greg Kinney, Jim McGuire, and Meryl Truett. With subjects ranging from rural landscapes and near-forgotten small towns to small-town eateries and abandoned cabooses, Local Color explored and celebrated the South.

Preservation of Place: The Art of Edward Rice(August 27–November 20, 2011)Organized by the Morris Museum of Art, Preservation of Place: The Art of Edward Rice,was a retrospective exhibition of one of the South's most renowned contemporary painters. It included landscape and cityscape paintings—specifically Rice's signature images, representing the details of the vernacular architecture of Georgia and South Carolina. One of the most extensive showings of Rice's work to-date, the exhibition was accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication.Rice is a past recipient of a South Carolina Arts Commission Artist Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts / Southern Arts Federation Regional Fellowship. His paintings have been included in exhibitions at Babcock Galleries, New York, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, and Heath Gallery, Atlanta, among others. He is represented in the permanent collections of the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Columbia Museum of Art, the South Carolina State Museum, the Greenville County Museum of Art, the Georgia Museum of Art, the Morris Museum of Art and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Down South: Paintings and Paintings by Art Rosenbaum, Photographs by Margo Newmark Rosenbaum(September 17–November 6, 2011)This exhibition highlighted famed painter, muralist, illustrator, and the 2011 Westobou Festival Signature Artist Art Rosenbaum and his wife Margo, a well-known photographer.The exhibitionfeatured a sampling of drawings and photographs from the books accompanying the disc sets of Rosenbaum's field recordings of roots musicians performing songs and hymns unique to the South.

Civil War Redux: Pinhole Photographs by Willie Anne Wright(July 9–September 4, 2011)This exhibition focused on Wright's sepia-toned gelatin silver print photographs, all shot with a pinhole (lensless) camera, which mirror vintage photographs. Wright followed reenactors for thirteen years, capturing not the battles themselves, but the essence of mid-nineteenth-century life and the struggle and conflict of the War between the States.

Philip Juras: The Southern Frontier, Landscapes Inspired by Bartram's Travels(May 28–August 14, 2011)This exhibition highlighted the work of painter, Philip Juras. Juras recreates Southern U. S. wilderness before European settlement. This exhibition acquainted viewers with many of the important and imperiled ecosystems that remain in the South today—remnant natural communities that benefit from greater public awareness. Juras, a native of Augusta and a graduate of the University of Georgia (where he earned a BFA in drawing and painting and a master’s degree in landscape architecture), lives and works in Athens, Georgia.

The Charleston Renaissance: Works on Paper(April 23–June 26, 2011)Drawn from the Morris Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition presented more than two dozen watercolors and etchings by Ellen Day Hale, Alfred Hutty, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Anna Heyward Taylor, and Elizabeth O’Neill Verner. In addition, it represented a remarkable period in the cultural history of the twentieth-century South. The Charleston Renaissance, a period of extraordinary cultural revival, took place between the world wars. Driven by the city’s resident artists, poets, musicians, and architects, the Charleston Renaissance rescued South Carolina's leading city from the spiritual and physical malaise wrought originally by the Civil War and perpetuated by the Great Depression. The exhibition concentrated on favorite subjects of the period’s visual artists—landscapes, the city’s architecture as represented by some of its best-known landmarks, and scenes of local color.

I Will Tell You a Place: Paintings by Brian Rutenberg(January 29–May 15, 2011)This exhibition highlighted the work of painter, Brian Rutenberg. Brian Rutenberg's work is as grounded in Old Master painting and drawing as his sense of place and color is in coastal South Carolina, where he was born and raised. He spent his childhood exploring the coastal wetlands, developing a love for the landscape. He graduated from the College of Charleston, before moving to New York City where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the School of Visual Arts. His abstract oil paintings have always reflected his love of the low country, which he freely acknowledges. Rutenberg’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions in prestigious galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe, and Canada, and he will be the featured artist at the 2011 Morris Museum of Art Gala. The exhibition was organized with the assistance of Brian Rutenberg’s representative, the Jerald Melberg Gallery of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Return of the Wanderer: Recent Works by Boyd Saunders(February 12–April 10, 2011)This exhibition highlighted the work of painter, illustrator, printmaker, and sculptor, Boyd Saunders,the distinguished professor emeritus of art at the University of South Carolina. A native Tennessean, his work reflects his lifelong interest in storytelling. Saunders’s art has carried the story of the South all over the world and has been the subject of numerous one-man shows in the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and China. In addition, his work has received many awards and is represented in public, private, and corporate collections throughout the United States. In 1989, he created a limited, deluxe edition of William Faulkner’s short story Spotted Horses, illustrated with thirty-four of his own original lithographs, which was published to great acclaim by the University of South Carolina Press. He has twice been the featured artist, as well as the keynote speaker, at the annual International Faulkner Conference.

Introducing America to Americans: FSA Photography(November 20, 2010–January 30, 2011)Drawn from the Morris Museum's extensive photography collection, the exhibition examined the important role of the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information in documenting life in the South in the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties. The images showed Americans at home, at work, and at play with an emphasis on rural and small-town life as well as the adverse effects of the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, and increasing farm mechanization. In its later years, the project documented America's mobilization for World War II. Photographers represented in this exhibition were Esther Bubley, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott.

Helen M. Turner: The Woman's Point of View(October 9, 2010–January 16, 2011)This exhibition was organized by the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, and featured three Turner paintings from the Morris Museum's permanent collection. One of America's premier Impressionist painters, Helen Turner began painting around 1880, when the new Orleans Art Union was formed. She moved to New York City in 1895 where she studied at the Art Students League and with William Meritt Chase. Beginning in 1902, she began to exhibit widely and enjoyed great success, particularly as a painter of women in beautiful garden settings.Top

2010

Wolf Kahn Pastels(September 11–November 7, 2010)This exhibition celebrated the artist's eighty-third birthday.Wolf Kahn is widely considered one of America's finest landscape painters and a master of pastel. He is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Morris Museum of Art, and the National Academy of Design.

Painters' Reel: Contemporary Painting in Georgia(June 19–September 26, 2010)Originally organized by the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, this exhibition featured work by ten of Georgia’s most accomplished and famed contemporary artists, including several with long-standing ties to the Morris Museum—among them Don Cooper, Cheryl Goldsleger, Philip Morsberger, and Tom Nakashima. The work in the exhibition was distinguished by masterly technique, fantastic imagery, and a wonderful sense of color. This was the last opportunity to view the exhibition as it was dispersed upon closing at the Morris.

Unhindered by Seriousness: Sculpture by Carl Blair(July 3–August 29, 2010)This exhibition contained the sculpture of Carl Blair. Using nature as a point of departure, Blair, one of South Carolina’s most admired artists, has created a world populated by whimsical three-dimensional creatures of his own creation. His work has been featured in previous exhibitions at the Ringling Museum of Art, the Hunter Museum of American Art, and the Greenville County Museum of Art.

The Homeplace: Photographs by Kay DuVernet(March 27–June 20, 2010)This exhibition contained more than thirty color photographs, all abstractions from nature, by the late Kay DuVernet, a photographer and poet who was born in Albany, Georgia. DuVernet spent many years in New Orleans before returning to Albany, five years before her death at age 62. This was the first exhibition devoted to her photography at the Morris. All of the work in the exhibition was drawn from the museum’s distinguished photography collection.

Regional Dialect: American Scene Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection(March 6–May 30, 2010)This exhibition was organized in conjunction with The Seventh Annual Morris Museum of Art Gala. The exhibition brought together fifty-seven major works of art that examined American identity in the first half of the twentieth century. The Horseman Collection includes impressive paintings by influential artists of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940. Forty-three artists were represented in the exhibition. Regional Dialect: American Scene Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection was organized by The Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee. Its appearance at the Morris Museum of Art, its only venue in Georgia, was the second-to-last on a two-year tour.

Deep Sea: Drawings by William Golding(December 12, 2009–March 14, 2010)This exhibition consisted of an array of maritime drawings by the self-taught African American artist, William O. Golding. Shanghaied from the Savannah waterfront when he was eight years old, William O. Golding chronicled his travels through a series of maritime drawings that he created near the end of his life while a patient at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Savannah. Between 1932 and 1939 he executed around sixty drawings, created from his memories of the ships he sailed and the ports he visited around the globe.Top

2009

Response and Memory: The Art of Beverly Buchanan(November 21, 2009–January 31, 2010) This exhibition featured Beverly Buchanan, who has lived and worked in Georgia for much of her adult life. In her artwork, Buchanan depicts vernacular architecture and its environment. She constructs a narrative that serves as a metaphor for the triumph of the human spirit over poverty and adversity. Although academically trained, Buchanan utilizes the tools often associated with the self-taught artist, such as inserted text, found objects, and loosely applied vibrant color, to create visually the rich textures of the humble, yet complex, structures of her drawings, sculptures, prints, and photographs. This exhibition was sponsored in part by Thompson Building Wrecking Co., Inc. and PotashCorp.

Emil Holzhauer: The Georgia Years(August 29–November 29, 2009)
This exhibition focused on Emil Holzhauer's images of Georgia, the locality with which he is most closely associated.Born in Schwäbish Gmünd, Germany, Emil Holzhauer arrived in America in 1906—without prospects and unable to speak English. A century later, his work is lauded as thoroughly American, in terms of its style, subject matter, and sensibility.Holzhauer favored working in watercolor and pastel, but also mastered oil. Among the locales he painted were places he lived and visited, including upstate New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Maine; Canada; Mexico, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia.

William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961–2005(September 12–November 8, 2009)
This exhibition surveyed Christenberry's poetic documentation of southern vernacular architecture, signage, and landscape using a wide range of cameras, from his earliest Brownie photographs of the early 1960s to his later work with a large-format camera. The exhibition combined never-before-seen photographs, both old and new, with images that are now iconic, the exhibition comprised fifty vintage photographic works and one sculpture. Together, they conveyed the breadth of his singular photographic vision. Aperture, a not-for-profit organization devoted to photography and the visual arts, organized this traveling exhibition and produced the accompanying publications.

Southern Eccentric: Paintings by Larry Connatser(May 2, 2009–August 16, 2009)
The Morris Museum exhibited, for the first time, a selection from its holdings of hundreds of works of art by the late Larry Connatser. Connatser developed a unique style, often using brightly colored, three-dimensional dots organized within highly intricate compositions. In 2005, the Morris Museum was bequeathed the remainder of his estate, creating the largest collection of his work in a public institution. He is also represented in the collections of Savannah’s Telfair Museum of Art, which organized a major retrospective exhibition of his paintings in 2002, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, as well as corporate and private collections.

Nashville Portraits: Photographs by Jim McGuire(March 6, 2009–April 26, 2009)
Organized by the Morris Museum of Art, this exhibtion was comprised of sixty black and white portrait photographs of classic artists such as Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, and Bill
Monroe. McGuire personally selected this exhibition from more than a thousand portraits of singers, musicians and composers.

To Seek and Obtain: Recent Acquisitions by the Morris Museum of Art(January 24, 2009–February 22, 2009)
This exhibition featured recent acquisitions in several representative areas of the museum's collecting interests, including both historical and contemporary paintings by Southern artists and regional photography. Some of the artists represented were Horace Day, Jonathan Green, Rudolph Ingerle, and Sally Mann.

Inside Out: The Private World of Edith Caywood(January 17–April 19, 2009)
This was the first museum exhibition in Georgia of the artist's work. The subject matter of her work has been compared with the narratives of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Kate Chopin. Most of her subjects are single figures or small groups of figures set in interiors, which could be interpreted as rooms in old Southern homes or as the internal psychic spaces of a Southern mind. The perspective of the rooms, the postures of the figures, and the relationships of the figures to each other and to their settings hint at concealed emotion and, ultimately, existential isolation.Top

2008
It's a Dogs Life: Photographs by William Wegman from the Polaroid Collection (October 11, 2008–January 4, 2009)
This exhibition includes 29 photographs by one of the art world’s best known photographers. The prints on view featured Wegman’s now-famous pet Weimaraner, Fay Ray, successor to his original dog of the same breed, Man Ray. The photographs in the exhibition are typical of those produced using a special Polaroid camera, measuring 20 x 24 inches. The national tour of It’s a Dog’s Life: Photographs by William Wegman from the Polaroid Collection was coordinated by the Museum of Florida Art.

J. C. Leyendecker: America's "Other Illustrator"(November 1, 2008–January 11, 2009)
This exhibition included more than fifty original works by Leyendecker from the collection of the Haggin Museum of Art in Stockton, California, repository for the nation’s most complete collection of Leyendecker’s sketches, magazine covers, and advertisements. J. C. Leyendecker: America's "Other" Illustrator was organized by the Haggin Museum of Art, Stockton, California. The presentation of the exhibition at the Morris Museum of Art was sponsored by MCGHealth with additional support provided by Georgia Bank & Trust, E-Z GO, and Fulcher Hagler, LLP.

Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art (August 23–October 19, 2008)
This exhibition examines plantation images in the American South, plus related slave imagery in the context of the American landscape tradition. It features more than 75 paintings, works on paper, photographs, and mixed media compositions. Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art was organized by the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina.

Realist Paintings by Bryan LeBoeuf (July 26–September 28, 2008)
This exhibition gives visitors the opportunity to view the work of Bryan LeBoeuf, a young and talented artist from Houma, Louisiana. Informed by the techniques of the Old Masters, LeBoeuf's paintings incorporate beautifully painted surfaces, careful composition, and almost Baroque lighting effects. His subject matter may be traditional in appearance but it is quite contemporary in its psychological and social implications. Sponsored in part by Braye Boardman.

Notes on the 19th, 20th, and 21st Centuries: Paintings by Jeffrey Kronsnoble (June 7-August 10, 2008)This exhibition includes forty-one works of art by Jeffrey Kronsnoble, dating from the late 1960s to the present. From landscapes to meticulously rendered figures, Kronsnoble's paintings are characterized by fluent draftsmanship
and an appreciation for art history. Sponsored in part by CareSouth Homecare Professionals and by First Bank of Georgia.

A. Aubrey Bodine: Baltimore Pictorialist(May 3–July 13, 2008)
The Morris Museum of Art presents a representative sampling of masterworks by A. Aubrey Bodine, a photographer in the pictorialist style, who worked at the Baltimore Sun for fifty years. The exhibition was organized with the assistance of Kathleen Ewing, Washington's most important photography dealer and author of an authoritative book on Bodine's photography.

Something to Look Forward To: Abstract Art by 22 Distinguished Artists of African Descent(March 22–May 25, 2008)
The exhibition presents abstraction by African American artists inspired by the tradition of abstract expressionism. These artists, now in their sixties and seventies, have been pioneers for a half century in both the African American community and the art world. Some of the artists included in the exhibition are Betty Blayton, Edward Clark, Melvin Edwards, Sam Gilliam, Alvin Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell, John T. Scott, and Jack Whitten. Organized by the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.Top

2007Pleasant Journeys and Good Eats along the Way: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by John Baeder (December 8, 2007–March 9, 2008)
This traveling exhibition, organized by the Morris Museum of Art, includes oils and watercolors by John Baeder from the past thirty years, with emphasis on his affectionate documentation of roadside architecture.

Worth Remembering (November 24, 2007–February 24, 2008)
Drawn from the Morris Museum’s own collections, Worth Remembering presents viewers with a variety of art objects, including paintings, photographs, and sculpture, that stimulate powerful associations with personal and social ideals, transcending the limitations of time and mortality.

The Art of John Dos Passos (September 8–November 25, 2007)
Known primarily as an author, John Dos Passos also spent nearly fifty years producing hundreds of paintings. This exhibition chronicles his work through a selection of over 55 of Dos Passos's paintings. Organized by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC, in conjunction with Lucy Dos Passos Coggin. The presentation of the exhibition at the Morris Museum of Art is sponsored in part by Sun Trust Bank, Augusta.

A Collector's Discoveries and Revelations (September 22–November 11, 2007)
This exhibition is a small sampling of the many discoveries and revelations made by collector Julia J. Norrell as she assembled her collection of Southern art over the course of many years. Includes works by artists Jonathan Green, Beverly Buchanan, Eldridge Bagley, William Clarke, Nancy Witt, William Tolliver, and Stephen Kimball among others.

Beyond This World: Paintings by Lorenzo Scott (July 14-September 9, 2007)
This exhibition celebrates the paintings of self-taught artist Lorenzo Scott which are inspired by his study of the Renaissance and Baroque masters.

Genomes and Daily Observations (June 30–August 26)A supplement to the exhbition Abbot, Audubon, Catesby, and Wilson, this installation by Suzanne Stryk consists of her drawings (reminiscent of those of Catesby of Abbot), a naturalist's desk piled with biological specimens, and a mirror imprinted with a section of the human genome. Sponsored in part by Georgia Power Company.

Abbot, Audubon, Catesby, and Wilson: Naturalists in the South (June 30–August 26)This exhibition features prints and paintings by some of the most important artist-scientists to have worked in the South. The works of art were selected by curator Jay Williams from the permanent collection of the Morris. Sponsored in part by Georgia Power Company.

To Be a Virginian Where I Grew Up: Paintings by Eldridge Bagley (May 12–July 1, 2007)
Interpreting the life and landscape of rural Virginia over the course of more than twenty years, Eldridge Bagley's paintings comprise one of the richest segments of the museum's Julia J. Norrell Collection, from which this exhibition is drawn.

Philip Morsberger: A Passion for Painting (May 12–June 17, 2007)
The Morris Museum of Art presents this world-class collection of paintings from local and international favorite, Philip Morsberger. Morsberger's work is in major collections on both sides of the Atlantic, including those of the San Jose Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York.

Tom Nakashima: Two Decades (March 2–April 29, 2007)
The exhibition surveys the work of Tom Nakashima, William S. Morris Eminent Scholar in Art at Augusta State University. It includes his most recent series of paintings, the “treepiles” and “orchardhouse” paintings.

American Art Pottery from the Moody Collection at the Hickory Museum of Art (March 2–April 29, 2007)
This exhibition of over one hundred thirty pieces celebrates the gift of Frances Johnson Moody to the Hickory Museum of Art in Hickory, North Carolina.

Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of 1938–40 (January 12–February 18, 2007)
The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman series are among Jacob Lawrence's greatest achievements as a painter. At times powerfully exquisite, at other times raw, even awkward, their rough magic and expressive strength speak to us through time of two of the most important episodes of African American history. Organized by the Hampton University Museum. Sponsored in part at the Morris by Charles DeVaney, Dr. George and Dee Crawford, and Nicholas Dickinson & Associates, P.C. Top

2006An Ubroken Circle: Selections from the Collection of Julia J. Norrell (November 4, 2006–February 18, 2007)
The Julia J. Norrell collection includes paintings, photographs, prints, drawings, sculpture, and folk art drawn from the portion of Ms. Norrell's collection related to the American South. An Unbroken Circle gave viewers an opportunity to enjoy some of the notable works of art included in the collection.

Challening Reality: Ceramics of Sylvia Hyman (November 11, 2006–February 11, 2007)
Sylvia Hyman, one of the grandes dames of the world of ceramics creates meticulously crafted trompe l'oeil sculptures. Hyman's sculpture inspires both delight and a sense of disorientation when viewers realize that these everyday objects of wood, cardboard, and paper are actually made of clay.

Nostalgic Journey: American Illustration from the Collection of the Delaware Art Museum (October 28–December 31, 2006)Nostalgic Journey includes the work of some of America's most respected illustrators and documents the influence of printing technology on their images. Illustrations for books and periodicals have been an important part of the American visual experience for the last one hundred fifty years. They were created by at least fifteen thousand trained, professional artists, most of whose names are not to be found in the standard histories of art. Each of these images was reproduced thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of times, making these illustrations part of our national visual heritage.
The exhibition was organized by the Delaware Art Museum and sponsored in part by WJBF-TV News Channel 6 and Jim Hudson Lexus of Augusta.

Our Neighbors Collect: African American Art (September 8–October 29, 2006)
Working in cooperation with the Morris Museum's Friends of African American Art, the museum has assembled an exhibition representing work held in local private collections. Many of America's most important African American artists have roots in the South—something that is often reflected in their work—and, early in the twentieth century, many of them became very influential. Limited resources often led them to develop multiple skills—as artists, educators, curators, critics, and entrepreneurs. Some black artists drew their inspiration from the folk culture of the region. Beverly Buchanan and Benny Andrews, both represented in the exhibition, characterize this. Others—including Mose T, Clementine Hunter, and Margaret Ramsey—are genuinely untutored artists who have drawn on and depicted folk visions and personal experiences. It is hardly surprising that so many African American artists have worked outside formal traditions, since so many were deprived of formal art training. Each has improvised highly individual symbols, forms, and techniques to convey his or her ideas and feelings.

Human Foibles and Tender Mercies: The Photography of Lyle Bongé (August 26–October 22, 2006)
The Morris Museum of Art presented Human Foibles and Tender Mercies: The Photography of Lyle Bongé, a selection of images of Mardi Gras shot by Bongé from the early 1960s through 1974. A native of Biloxi, Mississippi, where he was born in 1929, Lyle Bongé was educated at Black Mountain College. A photographer since 1955, his work has been widely exhibited and published. Many of his Mardi Gras prints are included in his book, The Sleep of Reason: Lyle Bongé's Ultimate Ash-Hauling Mardi Gras Photographs (1974).
Bongé's starkly evocative black-and-white photographs of New Orleans's famous pre-Lenten celebration have helped to enrich our appreciation of the meaning of this festival of renewal. More than any of the artist's other photographs, they have established the reputation of this Southern artist as a larger-than-life maker of poetic images. Painter William Dunlap recently observed, “The photographs in Lyle Bongé's Sleep of Reason series show us a pre-Hurricane Katrina and pre-corporate Mardi Gras. His subjects work hard at their revels and it shows. The visual rewards are ours.”
This exhibition was made possible in part by the Dusti Bongé Foundation and the City of Biloxi, Mississippi.

Zelda by Herself: The Art of Zelda Fitzgerald (August 26–October 15, 2006)
This exhibition of watercolors, as well as a section of Zelda Fitzgerald's paper doll constructions, represents the recurrent themes in her late work. The images include nostalgic scenes from her life during the Jazz Age, fantasy pieces that revolve around well-known fairy tales, and biblical works that were created toward the end of her life when she was overcome by a religious fervor. The exhibition provides viewers with an understanding of Zelda's distinctive identity as a creative, passionate artist who made a significant contribution to twentieth-century art.
Tour organized by International Arts & Artists, Washington, D.C. The presentation of Zelda by Herself: The Art of Zelda Fitzgerald in Augusta is sponsored in part by Elliott Davis, LLC.

By Native Hands: Native American Baskets from the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art (June 8–August 13, 2006)
The exhibition features sixty-five baskets from the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, many of which have never been loaned before. Most of the baskets were produced between 1850 and 1910,
by artisans representing more than forty North American tribes from across the continent. This collection features baskets of all types: from the small burden baskets of the Klikitat in the
Pacific Northwest to the ornate feathered basketry of the Pomo in the Southwest, large hand-painted splint storage baskets from the Northeast, and the elaborate double-weave of richly dyed
Choctaw in the Southeast. Courtesy of the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, Mississippi. Tour development by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, Kansas City, Missouri.

Realizations: The Art of Hubert Shuptrine (May 27–August 13, 2006)
The exhibition celebrates the distinguished career of Chattanooga-native Hubert Shuptrine (1936–2006). The exhibition, drawn from museum and private collections around the southeast,
includes nearly thirty of Shuptrine's watercolors and is accompanied by a catalogue of the same title.

The Murphys of Savannah: A Family of Painters (May 6–June 25, 2006)
This collection of works was culled from the Morris's permanent collection and organized by Karen Towers Klacsmann, Adjunct Assistant Curator for Research. Each of the four artists represented in the exhibition made significant contributions to the cultural climate of Savannah.

The Songs of Maybelle Stamper (April 22–May 28, 2006)The Songs of Maybelle Stamper includes over eighty works on paper produced primarily while Stamper lived in the South, on Captiva Island, Florida beginning in the mid-1940s. While Stamper's works refer to her experience of the natural world, they also spring from a deeper source, the world of imagination and dreams. In order to express
spiritual and psychological truths as she saw them, she incorporated elements of abstraction and surrealism. As the artist's mature style developed during the 1950s,
her lithographs and watercolors became increasingly enigmatic and mysterious. For Stamper, life on Captiva was a mystical experience best expressed through art.

What Dogs Dream: Paintings and Works on Paper by William Dunlap (March 4–May 7, 2006)
In this exhibition the artist explores the landscape of the mind and through his use of allegory, animism, and elements of language, he sheds light on the cultural landscape of the South. William Dunlap has distinguished himself as an artist, arts commentator and educator, during a career that has spanned more than three decades. The exhibition was sponsored in part by I. T. Sportswear, Atlanta Gas Light, and James H. Drew III.

Salmagundi Club: An American Institution (January 28–April 9, 2006)
From a modest beginning, the Salmagundi Club has grown to more than six hundred members including artists, non-artists, and exceptional people in the entertainment
and business community. Salmagundi Club: An American Institution represented a survey of the club's history including more than sixty works of art, photographs, and the coveted Salmagundi Club medal. Exhibition presentation courtesy of the Salmagundi Club Inc., New York, New York. Tour development by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, Kansas City, Missouri. Top

2005Illuminated Literature: The Art of Jerry and Brian Pinkney (November 19, 2005–February 19, 2006)
Jerry and Brian Pinkney, father and son, have given form and color to stories that have shaped the values of a generation of children. The works in this exhibition were selected from eleven of the many great books that Jerry and Brian Pinkney have illustrated.
Brian Pinkney's scratchboard drawings have illustrated such books as In the Time of the Drums, by Kim L. Siegelson, and Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King, by Jean Marzollo.
Watercolor illustrations by Jerry Pinkney in the exhibition include those from John Henry, by Julius Lester, and The Talking Eggs, by Robert D. San Souci, a Caldecott Honor Book.

An American Story: The Wyeth Family Tradition of Art (November 12, 2005–January 15, 2006)
Over the past two decades, the public has shown a
growing fascination with the paintings of the Wyeth family. This
exhibition enlarges the public's view of this famous clan, supplementing the trio's paintings
with work by four other talented members of the family circle. An American Story: The Wyeth Family Tradition of Art was organized by the Delaware Art Museum. The presentation in Augusta was sponsored in part by
Georgia Bank & Trust Company—Wealth Management, Augusta Coca-Cola Bottling Company, and John L. Creson, Esq.

The Cumberland Plateau: Photographs by Jack Stoddart (October 15–November 13, 2005)
The Morris Museum of Art acquired a set of Jack Stoddart's Upper Cumberland Collection of photographs in 2003 and here exhibits it for the first time in The Cumberland Plateau: Photographs by Jack Stoddart. During the seventies, Jack Stoddart worked in a sawmill and as an assistant to a veterinarian, while living in a primitive log cabin. All the while, he began documenting
the remnants of the Upper Cumberland's rural heritage, processing his film and enlarging his negatives in an old grocery store restroom. Stoddart's lens captured the forms and
textures of people and things that had found a traditional place in the Cumberland: a hermit's house, a swinging bridge, a wagon road, a mule team, a barn, an old fiddle.

Cheryl Goldsleger: utopia (September 24–November 6, 2005)
For the series utopia Cheryl Goldsleger created mixed-media paintings based on the work of women architects, assuming the viewpoint of the
female architects she encountered in her research. Cheryl Goldsleger: utopia was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta.

Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty among Artists of the Thirties (September 3–October 30, 2005)
This exhibition presents Eudora Welty's photographs of the 1930s together with paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs by notable American artists of the era—offering comparisons between Welty's artistic motivation and other visual interpretations of the times.
The Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty among the Artists of the Thirties tour was organized by International Arts & Artists, Inc., Washington, D.C. The exhibition is
sponsored in part at the Morris Museum of Art by Elliott Davis, LLC, Advisors-CPAs-Consultants.

Heartland Memories: The Prints of Jackson Lee Nesbitt (August 27–October 9, 2005)
This exhibition examines the length of printmaker Jackson Lee Nesbitt's career. It includes the first etching he produced as a professional artist in 1935 as well as the last, in 1993.
Nesbitt's mentors included Thomas Hart Benton, one of the leading artists in the regionalist movement, characterized by realistic depictions of everyday scenes from the American Midwest and Deep South.
Nesbitt created numerous prints commissioned by steel, manufacturing, and oil companies in addition to his many genre etchings.

Red Grooms: Selections from the Complete Graphic Work (June 3–August 21, 2005)
This national touring exhibition covers more than 40 years of printmaking by the internationally-known artist, Charles Rogers "Red" Grooms. Organized by the State Museum in Grooms's hometown, Nashville, Tennessee, it reveals the practiced hand of a lifelong master draftsman
and a perfectionist who has experimented with all facets of printmaking.
The exhibition consists of 130 objects including both two and three-dimensional works. Red Grooms: Selections from the Graphic Work was organized by the Tennessee State Museum from the collection of Walter G. Knestrick.

Lord, Remember Me! Photographs by Stanley Lanzano (March 19–June 5, 2005)
Stanley Lanzano's photographs of revival meetings at small, African American churches in the South Carolina Lowcountry are eloquent and powerful witnesses to
an American cultural tradition. Lanzano, vacationed at Pawleys Island resort in 1993 and visited a small African American
congregation, where he heard Georgetown's the Reverend Floyd Knowlin, an itinerant preacher. After a half-dozen trips back to South Carolina from his
Boulder, Colorado, home, Lanzano went beyond the immediate church experience to develop an interest "in the lives of the participants, their feelings about
their religion," and "their feelings about race relations."

Rhythms of Life: The Art of Jonathan Green (March 5–May 15, 2005)
The exhibition features 30 paintings spanning two decades
by the native South Carolina artist drawn from both public and private collections. Rhythms of Life: The Art of Jonathan Green was organized by the Gibbes Museum of Art. The exhibition's presentation in Augusta was made
possible in part by Bold American Catering, Atlanta Gas Light Company, ElliottDavis, and Pollock Company.

The Faculty Show: Recent Work by ASU & USC/Aiken Art Department Faculty (January 29–March 13, 2005)
The Faculty Show is a survey of recent works of art by the full-time instructional staff of Augusta
State University and the University of South Carolina at Aiken. The exhibition was limited to one art work per artist, with the choice of the particular work
left to the artist.
Faculty members whose work is included in the exhibition include Albin Beyer, Kristin Casaletto, Michael Fowler, Priscilla Hollingsworth, Philip Morsberger,
Tom Nakashima, Jennifer Onofrio, Brian Rust, and Janice Williams McClendon Whiting.

A Northern Adventure: The Art of Fred Machetanz (January 8–February 20, 2005)
Organized by the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and the Anchorage Museum Association, the exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue—of the same title—by Kesler Woodward. Top

2004Once Upon a Picture: The Art of Marc Brown (November 13, 2004–January 16, 2005)
This exhibition is made up of original
illustrations by the creator of the popular Arthur Adventure book series, which developed into the PBS television series Arthur. It includes many of Brown's delightful pencil, pen-and-ink,
and watercolor illustrations featuring the ever-popular characters and stories he has created. This exhibition was originally organized by the Erie Art Museum, Erie,
Pennsylvania, with the support of a grant from the Erie Arts Endowment. Its presentation at the Morris is made possible in part by Pediatric Partners of Augusta, LLC.

Ray Ellis in Retrospect: A Painter's Journey (October 22–December 26, 2004)Ray Ellis in Retrospect: A Painter's Journey, the first retrospective of Ellis's work, includes dozens of paintings
from the 1970s to the present, documenting a fifty-year career.
Organized by the Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia;
sponsored in part by Wachovia Wealth Management.

William Christenberry: The Tenant House Paintings (August 7–October 31, 2004)
The exhibition, organized by the Morris Museum of Art, features work by one of the most
widely collected and admired Southern artists. It is made up of early paintings, work that marked an important turning point in
Christenberry's career.
William Christenberry is represented in virtually every major museum in the country, as well as corporate and private collections too
numerous to mention.

Walker Evans and James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (August 28–October 10, 2004)
This exhibition illuminates Walker Evans's changing perception of his own work through both editorial and philosophical revisions,
and now, more than sixty years after its original publication, the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men reasserts the still poignant truth of
Agee and Evans's vision. The exhibition is drawn exclusively from original materials now preserved at the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Rolling Stone Press: Selections from the Permanent Collection (August 14–October 3, 2004)
Established in 1984, Rolling Stone Press has published more than one hundred fifty editions by many of the most important
artists in the Southeast. The Morris Museum collection includes work by William Christenberry, Don Cooper, Pat Courtney, John
Koegel, and others. This selection demonstrates the Morris Museum's ongoing commitment to the development of a significant
collection of contemporary art that reflects the complexity and diversity of the South.

Point of View: American Folk Art from the William and Ann Oppenhimer Collection (May 28–August 15, 2004)
The exhibition features more than 85 works of art
by fifty artists—including Howard Finster, Bessie Harvey, and Noah Kinney—collected over thirty years by William and
Ann Oppenhimer of Richmond, Virginia.
Organized by the Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond Museums, Virginia. A seventy-two-page catalogue published by University of Richmond
Museums accompanies the exhibition.

The Elemental Nude: Recent Sculpture by Anita Huffington (June 12–August 1, 2004)
Anita Huffington has achieved noteworthy success over the length of her more than 30-year long career as a sculptor.
The fluid and graceful forms of her sculpture evidence Huffington's aspirations and training as a dancer. A dancer who studied with Martha Graham, Huffington's affinity for all the arts soon put her in the company of poets, musicians, sculptors, and painters.
Many of those artists, including Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Larry River, and Al Leslie, became lifelong friends.

Janos Enyedi, Made in America: The American Industrial Landscape—Reconstructed (April 2–May 30, 2004)
This retrospective exhibition highlighting the recent mixed media works of Janos Enyedi was organized and presented
by the National Museum of Industrial History, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in association with the Smithsonian Institution. The
exhibition is presented through a generous contribution from Altria Group, Inc. Additional support was provided by the AFL-CIO
and private contributions. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.

Richard Jolley: Sculptor of Glass (March 6–May 9, 2004)
The is the first retrospective exhibition highlighting the bold and intricate work of one of this country's leading glass sculptors,
Richard Jolley. The exhibition, organized by the Knoxville
Museum of Art, comprises dozens of objects dating from 1984 to the present. It is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.

Recent Acquisitions: African American Art in the South (January 17–March 28, 2004)
The Morris Museum of Art began the new year with an exhibition of nineteen works of art by nine prominent African American
artists which were added, through gift or purchase, to the museum's permanent collection during 2003. Particular highlights include
major works by Hale Woodruff, Emma Amos, Elizabeth Catlett, Bessie Nickens, Purvis Young, and Lorenzo Scott.

Jack Spencer: Photographs from Native Soil (January 10–February 15, 2004)
The exhibition of photographs, recently acquired for the museum's permanent collection, was first published in Jack Spencer's first book, Native Soil (Louisiana State University Press, 1999). Together, these works provide a concise survey of the field and
darkroom techniques with which the artist has captured the haunting and evocative spirit of the Mississippi River Delta.Top

2003Baby-Boom Daydreams: The Art of Douglas Bourgeois (November 22, 2003–February 15, 2004)
The fascinating work of acclaimed figurative artist Douglas Bourgeois is the subject of this major retrospective exhibition. The exhibition, which includes more than 60 paintings spanning the
length of Bourgeois's 25-year long career, was organized by David S. Rubin, Curator of Visual Arts at the Contemporary Arts Center of
New Orleans and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated color catalogue (published by Hudson Hills Press) that features essays by Rubin, Dan Cameron, Senior Curator
of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and independent scholar and art consultant Estill Curtis Pennington.

The Low Country: Paintings by Preston Russell (November 8, 2003–January 11, 2004)
This exhibition, organized by the Morris Museum of Art, features paintings that were published in Russell's The Low Country: From
Savannah to Charleston, Paintings by Preston Russell (2003).

Edward Rice: Recent Monotypes (November 14, 2003–January 4, 2004)
Recent works of North America and Europe by artist Edward Rice are featured in Edward Rice: Recent Monotypes. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated color
catalogue that features brief essays by Phillip Garrett, David Houston, June Lambla, and Edward Rice. The exhibition was made possible in part by the support of
Pat Knox and H. M. Osteen.

A Century of Progress: Twentieth Century Painting in Tennessee (August 23–November 9, 2003)
This exhibition features the work of more than 60 artists who lived or painted in Tennessee during the past 100 years. The traveling exhibition organized by the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the Tennessee Historical Society.

The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art ( May 9–August 10, 2003)
This exhibition features more than seventy paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs by many of the most important American artists of the past century and a half. The exhibition catalogue features eighty full-color illustrations, scholarly contributions by Andrea Barnwell, Tritobia Hayes Benjamin, Kirsten Buick, and Amy Mooney, as well as a reflective essay on collecting by Walter O. Evans. It is published by the University of Washington Press and the Walter O. Evans Foundation of Art and Literature, which also organized the exhibition.

Japonisme: The Influence of Japanese Art in the South (March 13–May 11, 2003)
This exhibition includes prints and watercolors by several artists connected to the South whose work demonstrates the widespread
influence of Japanese aesthetics on Western art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Works in this exhibition were borrowed from the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, and from the Columbia
Museum of Art, in Columbia, South Carolina.

Walking the Log: Memories of a Southern Childhood: Paintings by Bessie Nickens (March 1–May 18, 2003)
Selected works by self-taught artist Bessie Nickens are featured in an exhibition of her work. Many of the paintings in the exhibition appear in Nickens's book of reminiscences Walking the Log: Memories of a Southern Childhood (New York: Rizzoli Publishers, 1994).

Martha Simkins Rediscovered (January 16–April 20, 2003)
Selected works by American painter Martha Simkins are featured in the first major retrospective exhibition of her work. The traveling exhibition was organized and curated by Robert A. Horn of New York City in association with Martha Simkins, Inc., and sponsored by Roger E. Saunders and Mr. and Mrs. Jim Eitelman. A fully illustrated color catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays written by Dr. Valerie Leeds and Dr. Melina Kervandjian.Top

2002Rituals: Works on Paper by Romare Bearden (November 15, 2002–January 5, 2003)
This special exhibition of screenprints by Bearden, an acclaimed master of the medium, is highlighted by his Prevalence of Ritual Suite, which was recently acquired by the Morris Museum. The images in the suite—all dramatically large and, characteristically, brilliantly designed and colored—derive from some of the Bible stories Bearden learned to love as a child in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Prevalence of Ritual Suite is complemented by additional works courtesy of Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina.

Charleston in My Time: The Paintings of West Fraser ( October 17, 2002–January 5, 2003)
The exhibition showcases West Fraser's plein-air paintings of city landmarks, lowcountry scenes, and glimpses of life along streets and lanes, marshes, and rivers. An accompanying book features two introductory essays by friend and collector Ted Phillips and art historian Angela Mack. Organized by the Charleston Renaissance Gallery.

Modernism in the South: Mid-Twentieth-Century Works in the Morris Museum Collection (April 25–August 4, 2002)
This exhibition examines the influence of modernism on Southern artists, specifically those represented in the museum's permanent collection. Accompanied by a catalogue by Marilyn Laufer.

2001Henry Casselli: Master of the American Watercolor (November 29, 2001–January 27, 2002)
This thirty-year retrospective exhibition of watercolorist Henry Casselli presents the full range of his work. From combat in Vietnam, to NASA missions, to portraits of the famous including Ronald Reagan, John Glenn, and Muhammad Ali, Casselli portrays his subjects with personal observation and attention. Known primarily as a painter of people, he also explores such recurring themes as ballet dancers, family members, and African American subjects, among them his friends and neighbors in New Orleans. Organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Jack Leigh: The Land I'm Bound To (August 23–October 14, 2001)
This exhibition was organized
by the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. In Augusta, the
exhibition is generously underwritten by Young at Art, an affiliate
organization of the Morris Museum of Art.

Personal Visions: Southern Self-Taught Art (June 21–November 11, 2001)
This exhibition highlights
works from the museum's collection that were created by self-taught
artists over the past fifty years. Whether described as "outsider
art," "visionary art," or "self-taught art," it is work characterized
by spontaneity and eloquence of expression. It is art that stands
apart from the mainstream, not bound by art history or traditions.
It is art shaped by personal vision.

Maritime Memories: The Art of William O. Golding (June 14–September 9, 2001)Maritime Memories: The Art of William O. Golding chronicles the life and art of African American self-taught artist William O. Golding. It features selected works from the Morris Museum of Art's permanent collection and the Charleston Renaissance Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina.

Kesler Woodward, North and South (January 11–April 8, 2001)
Paintings from opposite
corners of the continent are featured in an exhibition titled Kesler Woodward, North and South. The exhibition
features landscapes of Alaska and the Carolinas by an artist
who grew up in Aiken, South Carolina, and has spent most of
his adult life as an artist, art professor, curator, and art
historian in Alaska. Organized by the Morris Museum of Art in conjunction with the Jerald Melberg Gallery. The exhibition catalogue features an essay by Frank Soos. Top

2000Myth, Memory and Imagination: Photographs from the Collection of Julia J. Norrell (November 16–December 31, 2000)
Photographs of sharecroppers,
country churches, river baptisms, and other classic images
of the rural South were featured in this exhibition which was drawn from a larger nationally traveling
exhibition organized and circulated by the McKissick Museum,
University of South Carolina.

The Sporting View: American Sporting Art from the Collection of Robert B. Mayo (September 14, 2000–January 3, 2001)
Paintings, drawings, and illustrations dealing with the topics of hunting and fishing showcase the role of these sports in American art history. The works have been selected from the collection of 19th- and 20th-century sporting art assembled by Robert Mayo of Virginia.

Berry Fleming: August Artist and Author (June 15–October 29, 2000)
Augusta-born Berry
Fleming is one of the city's best known writers,
gaining national fame as the author of more than twenty novels
including the popular Colonel Effingham's Raid. His
first love, however, was painting. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring
essays by Starkey Flythe, William Harper, and Edward Rice.

Freeman and Cora Schoolcraft: A Tribute (June 15–September 3, 2000)
In the exhibition Freeman
and Cora Schoolcraft: A Tribute, the Morris Museum of
Art recognizes the contributions made to the Augusta arts
community in the second half of the twentieth century by Freeman
Schoolcraft and his wife, Cora, artists who inspired and nurtured
a circle of students and artists. A publication accompanies the exhibition.

Mark Catesby (June 9–August 13, 2000)
English naturalist
Mark Catesby is considered by many to be the founder
of American ornithology. Catesby made two expeditions to the
southern part of colonial America in the first half of the
eighteenth century. His
images of flora and fauna influenced the style of later artists,
notably John Abbot and John James Audubon.

Art and Nature: The Hudson River School (April 3–June 4, 2000)
Featuring 27 paintings by such noted artists as Thomas
Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, Jasper Cropsey, Sanford
Gifford, John Kensett, David Johnson, John Casilear, and George
Inness, the exhibition was organized from the collection of
the Albany Institute of History and Art in New York. Tour organized by Smith Kramer, Inc.

John Abbot: Early Georgia Artist and Naturalist (March 5–May 29, 2000)
While he has been compared
to fellow artist and scientist John James Audubon, John Abbot
focused his life's work in the state of Georgia. On display at the Morris
Museum of Art are paintings
from the permanent collection of the Morris as well as works on loan from Robert M. Hicklin, Jr.

Philip Morsberger: Paintings and Drawings from the Sixties (January 27– March 19, 2000)
Figurative paintings from the 1960s heavily influenced by the political climate
and pop art trends of the of the time offer audiences a different
perspective on the work of Philip Morsberger. The exhibition
features paintings drawn primarily from the Butler Institute
of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, with additional works
borrowed from Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio; Columbus
Museum, Columbus, Ohio; and Ohio Northern University, Ada,
Ohio. These works were initially brought together last winter
for an exhibition at the Miami University Art Museum. The exhibition at the Morris was
initiated by Richard Gruber who also wrote an essay for the exhibition catalogue.

William Halsey (January 27–March 26, 2000)
Collages, assemblages,
and sculptures celebrating the distinguished career of William
Halsey are on exhibit. A noted modernist,
known as a pioneer of abstract painting in the South, Halsey
drew inspiration from Charleston, South Carolina, the historic
city he loved. The exhibition was
organized by the Greenville County Museum of Art as part of
the South Carolina Arts Commission's millennial celebration,
"Views from the Edge of the Century" and includes
works from 1951 through 1997.Top

1999Subdued Hues: Mood and Scene in Southern Landscape Painting,
1865–1925 (November 18, 1999–January 16, 2000)
Estill Curtis Pennington has selected landscapes
from the Morris Museum's collection and from ten other museums
and four private collections to address the question of how
landscape painting in the South differed from works created
in the same time period by American artists in other areas
of the country. In the exhibition and
the accompanying catalogue, Mr. Pennington explores the concept
of landscape art as a reflection of the national mood.

The Charleston Renaissance (September 9–November 7, 1999)
This exhibition, the most comprehensive
study of the art of this period, features works created in
Charleston, South Carolina, from 1915 through the 1940s. The Morris Museum will also showcase 32 complementary
works by significant artists from its permanent collection
in the exhibition. Organized by the Greenville
County Museum of Art, The Charleston Renaissance was
curated by Martha R. Severens, curator of the Greenville County
Museum of Art. Carolina First sponsors the exhibition.

Robert Stackhouse: Major Works 1969–1999 (May 20– August 22, 1999)
This retrospective
exhibition, organized by the Morris Museum of Art, and the
accompanying catalogue offer a comprehensive overview of Stackhouse's
life and work to the present date. The exhibition
will include representative examples from his earliest works
and his noted A-frame structures of the 1970s through his
works of the 1990s. Organized by the Morris Museum
of Art and curated by J. Richard Gruber. The John and Maxine Belger Family
Foundation, Kansas City, Missouri, generously supported
the presentation of this exhibition. Learn about Robert Stackhouse's sculpture installation at Augusta State University.

Wolf Kahn: Southern Landscapes (February 18–May 2, 1999)
This exhibition presents
a distinctive body of original pastels and oil paintings
inspired by the environment of Augusta, Georgia, and the surrounding
region, all created by one of America's most respected contemporary
landscape painters. The installation also offers a rare
opportunity to study the diverse stages in the working process
of a major artist.

Heirs of Magic Realism: Representation in Current Dutch Painting (February 18–May 2, 1999)
This special exhibition,
which showcases the work of a dozen Dutch artists, was put
together by Estill Curtis Pennington. With this exhibition,
Mr. Pennington introduces to us the work of artists who reflect
both a concern with the solidity of things in the formal composition
of their work, and an implied subliminal narrative theme.
In so doing, he also finds links with current trends in realist
painting in the South.

Sojourners Abroad: Southern Women Artists in Europe 1879–1989 (February 18–May 2, 1999)
Evidence abounds to
challenge the idea that Southern women artists studied and
worked in relative obscurity and isolation during the past
120 years. As part of an ongoing research project, the Women
Artists Committee at the Morris Museum of Art found that
the artists presented in this exhibition followed traditional
paths of art study that were available in this part of the
country at the time.

Robert Gwathmey: Works from Southern Collections (February 18–May 9, 1999)
This is a small, focused
exhibition designed to showcase a single painting from the Morris
Museum's collection in the context of other works by the same
artist. Organized by the Columbus
Museum, Columbus, Georgia, the exhibition brings together works
from the collections of seven Southern art museums. It opened
in Columbus in October 1998, spotlighting the painting entitled Sunday Morning, which had been acquired by the Columbus
Museum in 1996. In Augusta, the featured work is Reflections,
a painting acquired by the museum in 1992.Top

1998Haunter of Ruins: Clarence John Laughlin (December 3, 1998– January 17, 1999)
A special exhibition
of 65 photographs by Clarence John Laughlin, Haunter of Ruins:
Clarence John Laughlin is originated by the Historic New
Orleans Collection and is circulated by Curatorial Assistance,
Los Angeles. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog, a
Bulfinch Press book published by Little, Brown in 1997, and
features excerpts from Laughlin's writings and letters as
well as essays by noted authors Andrei Codrescu and Ellen
Gilchrist.

Spirit of the North: The Art of Eustace Paul Ziegler (November 12, 1998– January 31, 1999)
This retrospective exhibition
of nearly one hundred paintings, drawings, etchings, and illustrative
works by Eustace Paul Ziegler, one of Alaska's
most beloved artists
includes works drawn from Alaska collections, the Pacific
Northwest, Hawaii, California, Georgia, and New York, and represents
a collaborative venture between the Anchorage Museum of History
and Art, and the Morris Museum of Art.

Augustus Vincent Tack: Landscape of the Spirit (August 4–October 25, 1998)Augustus Vincent
Tack: Landscape of the Spirit was organized by the Phillips
Collection in Washington, D.C. This is the first retrospective
exhibition ever devoted to the career of American visionary
painter Augustus Vincent Tack. The exhibition
debuted at the Phillips Collection in 1993 before beginning
a national tour.

The West in American Art: Selections from the Bill and Dorothy Harmsen Collection of Western Americana (May 28–July 19, 1998)
The museum of painting in the South takes on a Western look with this special exhibition which includes approximately 60 paintings exploring our fascination with the American West. Organized for national tour by the Colorado Historical Society in Denver, Colorado, the paintings have been selected from the William and Dorothy Harmsen Collection of Western Americana which is important both for its aesthetic and historical content. With the assistance of Smith Kramer, Inc., a fine arts service company located in Kansas City, Missouri, the exhibition is traveling to selected American museums over a three-year period.

On the Road with Thomas Hart Benton: Images of a Changing
America (February 12–May 10, 1998)
A exhibition exploring the travels of Thomas Hart Benton as
inspiration for some of his most significant works is on display at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta before going on
a national tour. Curated by J. Richard Gruber the exhibition features some
twenty paintings and more than fifty-five drawings and will
travel under the auspices of Smith-Kramer Fine Art Services
after its Augusta debut. Top